Spain’s most popular national Top 40 radio network, Los 40 Principales, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year with its first Los Premios Principales gala on Dec. 16. It will be Spain’s only award ceremony whose winners are voted by the general public.
The network, which has more than 4 million daily listeners, today (Oct. 12) unveiled nominations in the seven national and three international categories.
Leading candidate is pop group La Oreja De Van Gogh with 5 national nominations. The band is up for best group, best tour for “Guapa Tour,” best video and best song — both for “Muñeca De Trapo” (Sony BMG) — and best album for “Guapa,” which has sold some 800,000 units worldwide, says Los 40, including nearly 400,000 in Spain.
Catalan rumba brothers Estopa (Sony BMG) have four national nominations, while singer Ana Torroja (Sony BMG), vocalist Diego Martin (DRO) and pop-rock group El Canto Del Loco (Sony BMG) claim three nods each.
The international nominations are a female thing, with Madonna (Warner Bros), Colombia’s Shakira (Sony BMG), Mexico’s Julieta Venegas (Sony BMG) and British newcomer Lucie Silvas (Mercury) each taking two nominations.
Los 40 listeners can cast votes by mobile phone SMS messages from October 14-November 30.
Los 40 director Jaume Baró explains that a jury formed by Los 40 owners, the Cadena SER news/talk network, which in turn is part of Spain’s largest audio-visual holding, Grupo Prisa, selected the five candidates for each category based on airplay rotation, market studies undertaken by Los 40, and sales of the artists’ discs in the past year.
The gala will be televised live by public station TVE1 and held in Madrid’s 14,000-capacity Palacio de los Deportes. The venue was inaugurated last year with state-of-the-art acoustic systems after the original 50-year-old venue was destroyed by fire 5 years ago.
